Michael Roddan National correspondent Sep 12, 2022 With not just access to, but ownership of, the country’s “largest” stock trading forum, HotCopper, not to mention the self-described, “leading source of authoritative breaking stock market news”, The Market Herald, you’d think the eponymous ASX-listed company that owns both assets would be an investing powerhouse. Yet Jag Sanger, the founder and boss of The Market Herald (TMH), appears to be enduring a period of portfolio underperformance that can befall even the giants of equities investment. The HotCopper platform has long been a haven for deluded day traders, flat earthers and, more nefariously, stock rampers and disguised officer holders. Virginia Star After a rather healthy 2021, the value of listed shares, options and debentures on TMH’s books sunk $8.3 million to $10.6 million in FY22, a paper loss of nearly 50 per cent. This led TMH to swing to a $3.2 million annual loss from last year’s $13.1 million profit. TMH is one small part of Australia’s (and Canada’s) vast micro-cap stock-hyping, industrial complex. Along with its online publications, it runs a digital consulting arm, Advisir Ventures. Advisir is issued shares in some (but not all) of TMH’s advertising clients, which are both listed and pre-IPO firms, in return for high-value services such as, er, banner advertisements on HotCopper, emails to prospective investors, and glowing write-ups plastered across TMH’s various ventures (addendums note, to varying degrees, the sponsored nature of such content). The idea, self-evidently, is to align the incentives of TMH and the client for the client’s share price to rise. Such is the popularity for these services among Australia’s small end of town, TMH recorded a 30 per cent increase in customer contracts last year. But given the downside in TMH’s portfolio over the last year, it seems not all clients enjoy rising fortunes. Although the company says these holdings are “not actively managed” and “typically held for an agreed term”, TMH is now focusing on “finding the correct structure for this portfolio” over the next few months. Perhaps its clients are in need of a spotlight in “Thematica”, the self-proclaimed “investigative arm” of TMH. A July 2021 a Thematica report, titled How Cannabis Entered the Mainstream was sponsored by Neurotech International, Little Green Pharma and Adam Blumenthal’s Creso Pharma. But strangely enough, the report gave its priority profile to Advisir client firm Althea Group, which shared the report on its own corporate Facebook page. That page also spruiks several TMH soft interviews of Althea CEO Joshua Fegan, and a sponsored TMH report in May, titled: Is the European cannabis market about to light up for Australia’s Althea Group? Here, readers were told “investors who fail to see the benefits of getting involved in the cannabis industry now will likely rue their reluctance when they arrive late to the party”. Althea shares fell to 8¢ from 13¢ in the intervening period. TMH seems to have adopted the Advisir business model from Stockhouse, the Canadian small-cap message board it bought in 2019. Stockhouse’s services in 2017 were bought by Future Farm, a Canadian pot stock, where chairman William Gilde planned “to work with Stockhouse to promote the company and increase qualified investors’ awareness” of his firm. Bad luck when Future Farm was suspended in August 2020 by the Ontario and British Columbia securities commissions, having failed to complete the audit of its fiscal year 2020 accounts, and delisted by the Canadian Securities Exchange in July this year. Gilde told investors last month Future Farm “has not yet been able to close a financing that would provide the resources to complete audits”. Perhaps he should ask Stockhouse for the $68,000 contract fee back...
Australia's Hotcopper trading forum, nothing more than a pump & dump forum imo, the level of intelligence you will find at the bottom of a barrel.